


Every Man Is A Wolf To Other Men

by TheLionInMyBed



Series: Raised By Wolves [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Elves, Fantasy, Gen, Horror, Poor Life Choices, Trauma, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:26:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After fleeing his family, his city and his fate, Khazri Il'harren desperately needs space, time and a competent therapist. What he <em>has</em> is a locked cage, fast dwindling reserves of strength and a pair of hungry wolves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Man Is A Wolf To Other Men

**Author's Note:**

> For those that have read [Small Sacrifices](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5795248/chapters/13356943), this is set approximately eight years previously. For those that haven't, don't worry, this stands alone (though maybe read SS anyway, it's pretty good if I do say so myself)

 

They found it in the woods. 

It was late to be checking the traplines, getting on for dusk, and Beryl was already wondering about dinner. The twilight woods held no real fear for her, not so close to the cabin that had been her parents’. Hunger and impatience made her careless and she almost tripped over the body lying across the game trail they followed. 

She mistook it for an animal at first, from the way it lay curled up on itself and how the dying light reflected in its eyes. 

“What is it,” Jeff asked, coming up behind her, out of breath. “A child?”

“No child.  _ Sídhe. _ ” She’d never seen one, they never rode so far from their mountain homes, but she knew. Ash grey skin, cobweb hair and those ears, tapered like a bat’s. Its eyes were glazed and there was nothing human in them. 

“Can’t be,” he said. “They’re supposed to be tall. Fair. This thing looks like shit. It looks dead.” He toed it with his boot.

He wasn’t wrong. All her life she’d heard the stories. All her life she’d dreamt of faerie revels and the bright sound of bells, of dark women with high cheekbones and smiles sharp as knives. The reality was a disappointment that struck her hard as a blow to the gut. A grubby, sickly child half buried in the undergrowth was not the stuff of her fantasies. 

She was almost angry.

“It’s breathing,” she said. 

He considered. “What do we do with it?”

***

He awoke in a cage. 

After the fear and horror that had come before, Khazri found it almost a relief to lie there and stare up at the bars. They were iron. Thin and rusted but not something he’d be able to get though - not healthy and certainly not in his current state. Beyond them was a ceiling made up of bunches of some yellow fibre, nothing like the spellworked stone of Zalach'ann. Then where?

Something was breathing close by, heavy panting rasps, so he lay still, feigning unconsciousness while he tried to piece together what had happened. 

The memories were there but his mind recoiled from them so violently he couldn’t contain a physical flinch. Forget the indifference in his mother’s face, forget that she hadn’t even come to watch. Forget the sharp, deep pain of fangs and the blooming fire that flooded in their wake, spreading through him like hyphae. The helplessness and the waiting and the web ( _ over his mouth, he couldn’t  _ breath)- 

_ No _ . That was done with. What mattered was the flight that followed. He had had Gil’s knife with him when he woke and a vague memory of being carried, too mazed by the pain writhing under his skin to take note of whos or wheres. His cousin must have left him in the tunnels outside the city ( _ he’s smarter than me and stronger, they couldn’t have caught him _ ). Then the drugged blur of narrow passages ( _ too narrow for them to follow Goddess please _ ) that wound and meandered and terminated in dead ends that left him screaming and clawing at the rock. The sudden opening and glare of light so bright he thought he’d gone blind or mad ( _ madder _ ). 

So then. He was on the surface. 

His shoulder, numb for so long, throbbed and burned and it was that which finally drove him to move. He was cautious, stretching his limbs one by one, waiting for pain or an attack that didn’t materialize. He ached everywhere but the place above his collarbone, where the fangs had pierced him, was his only serious injury. He pulled aside bandages - rags in truth, albeit clean ones - to find his skin raw and charred. They’d held an iron to the wound, he remembered dimly, though he’d been too disorientated at the time to connect the glowing metal with the sudden searing agony that stole his consciousness. The smell of infection was gone at least, the dying flesh all burnt away, though the lingering pain made it hard to feel any gratitude. 

He was lying on a dirty blanket that reeked of damp fur and urine though he doubted he smelt any better himself. The only other furnishing was a bucket in the corner, up against the wall. The cage was too low to rise above a crouch and too short to stretch out fully. Three walls of the small room he was in were lined with more of them, empty but for one other which held two animals with grey fur and long muzzles. Dogs _ , _ he thought. He’d seen them, rarely, as an exotic attraction at pit fights, snapping over the entrails of losing warriors. These ones were smaller than in his memories but whether that was because they were a different species, or juvenile, he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he’d just been smaller then. They watched him quietly with gold-brown eyes, tongues lolling, and he found their presence queerly comforting. 

The room they were in was small and cluttered, blessedly dim and windowless. Opposite his cage was a workbench, covered with tools and half assembled traps. Cruel, spiked things but too small for a person and too easily escaped by any victim with opposable thumbs. Not professional slavers then but trappers who must have picked him up by happenstance. 

A quick inventory revealed that they’d taken Gil’s knife. He could hardly have expected them to leave it with him but he still felt a stab of anxiety. He was half naked as it was, in the shredded remnants of the tunic he’d failed to die in, but being unarmed left him feeling truly vulnerable, he who’d spent his childhood with a dagger beneath his pillow. 

The cages didn’t have locks of their own, just sliding bolts, but they’d added a padlock to his. It wasn’t a particularly good one but he had nothing to pick it with. He tried it for weakness but it was sturdy enough. Across from him, one of the animals pawed at the door to its own cage in imitation, setting it rattling. 

Their cage was perpendicular to his and, by stretching his arm through the bars, he was almost able to reach the bolt. One of the dogs attempted to lick his fingers, drooling over the lock in its enthusiasm. He stroked what little of its muzzle he could reach and whispered nonsense to it, fairly sure it wouldn’t bite. He had none of the magical power that was expected of a boy of his lineage but he’d always been good with animals, better with them than people for what little it was worth.

And with that he was out of options, out of things to occupy himself. His memories were there, curled up inside him like a snake ( _ like a spider _ ), ready to strike if disturbed. Let them lie - if he fell apart now, he’d never be able to put himself back together. He wanted to curl up and sleep again and never wake up, he wanted to scream and not stop until his throat bled. But hysteria wasn’t a productive courses of action; it would only mean that they’d been right ( _ they always were _ ). First, escape the cage. 

To keep himself distracted - and because he’d feel a fool if there was an escape route that he missed for lack of looking - he went over every inch of the cell, searching for a weakness in the bars, a loose nail or splinter to pick the lock. He had no real expectation of finding anything and wasn’t disappointed. 

If he was going to escape, it would not be without a key. 

But just to be sure, he checked the bars again. 

And again. 

***

They’d left him no water. The dogs didn’t have any either, which suggested carelessness rather than malice. His head ached and he was too hot, perhaps still feverish from infection. He pressed his forehead against the chill metal of the bars and shivered. 

It would be ironic, he supposed, to have survived gods, monsters and all the perils of the dark beneath the mountains only to die here to his captors’ negligence. 

Was that ironic, or merely incongruous? 

Irony. Irony. The metal warmed under his skin.  _ Strike while the irony is hot. _ That was funny. A pun. An ironic pun. 

_ And good advice _ . It was getting harder and harder to focus, his thoughts scrambling over each other like crabs in a bucket. If he didn’t do something soon, he’d be past the point where there was anything he could do. 

Drawing attention to himself went against every instinct he had but he grabbed the padlock and banged it hard against the bars, clanging loud enough to make the dogs snarl and yelp in surprise. 

He was rewarded with the sound of movement outside the room. The door creaked slowly open - useful, they couldn’t surprise him while he slept but nor could he leave the room without danger of alerting them. A human woman stood there, dressed in dull brown roughspun, trimmed with ragged fur. There was a knife at her belt - ugly unadorned metal but it drew his gaze like a magnet. He wondered what they had done with Gil’s blade of spellworked obsidian. Likely they intended to sell it - it was probably worth more than their hovel. 

“It’s awake,” she said, not speaking to him but someone in the other room. She was short for a woman and her features were soft and masculine. 

A human man shouldered past her and crouched before the cage so that their eyes were level. Khazri did not allow himself to recoil, or to flinch. He did not blink.

“Do you understand me?” the man said slowly. He was scruffily bearded - Khazri’s family always kept their slaves clean shaven and now he knew why.

He didn’t think he could manage a reply, even if he had wanted to, so he stared at him, blank faced. If they didn’t think he understood him, their speech would be less guarded and he might hear something to his advantage. They had to be used to dealing with dumb animals; let them think him another.

“Hey!” the man said and shook the bars. “Speak!”

Khazri kept his silence.

“It’s mute,” the woman said at last. Siblings? Lovers? Friends? He couldn’t tell. They both had hair the lusterless brown of dry earth, worm-pink skin and low slurring voices. 

“Or simple. Are we sure it’s even fae? It might be a goblin, grown too tall. No one will pay us for a goblin,” the man said. Khazri had a passable grasp of the Northern tongue but the man’s accent was thick, nothing like the crisp enunciation of his tutors, and when he spoke so fast it was hard to follow. 

“No one will pay us for a corpse. I’ll see if it will eat.” The woman ducked back into the other room, leaving the man to stare. 

And stare. 

Khazri stared back, searching the man’s face. Looking for greed or arrogance or compassion, anything he could use. 

The human’s eyes were as blank to him as the dogs’, black pupils ringed with brown. All he saw was himself, reflected, small and ragged and scared. 

The woman returned with an earthenware cup and a hunk of bread. She set both on the floor, nudged them to within his reach and then stepped back quickly. 

“Don’t they drink milk?” said the man, dubious. “That’s what my grandmother left out for them.”

“Where would we get milk out here? It’ll have water and it’ll like it.”

They looked at him expectantly but he didn’t move. 

Eventually they got bored. The woman gave the dogs water and pushed scraps of meat through the bars. Then they left the room. He heard the screech of a second door and then silence. 

He looked at the water in the cup, reached through the bars to pick it up.  

He didn’t drink. 

It smelt fresh and untainted but so many drugs and poisons were scentless. His hands were shaking hard enough that some of the water slopped over the side of the cup and onto his hand. He licked it off, tasting the sweat and blood and grime that clung to his skin. The water itself seemed fine but he put the cup aside. An hour, he told himself, to wait for any ill effects to manifest. It was the sensible thing to do. 

He would have counted off the minutes but the numbers jumbled themselves and he quickly lost track. His head ached and his vision swam. His skin itched and prickled, like there were insects crawling under it. If he stared long enough he could see them, skittering lumps out of the corner of his eye, swarming beneath the grey.  _ If they hadn’t taken the knife he could cut- _ He blinked, hard, and the movement vanished. There was nothing there, of course there wasn’t, it was thirst, or the water was poisoned, or the venom was still inside him. 

His throat hurt and his lips were so dry that when he licked them they cracked and bled against his tongue. If he didn’t drink he would die and never mind the poison. 

Once he’d come to a decision, he intended to drink slowly, to make it last, to keep his stomach from cramping. It would be best to ration it, not knowing when he would next have water. 

In truth it was all he could do not to drown himself, he drank so fast. He coughed, choked and kept drinking until the cup was empty and he was licking the last drops of moisture from the rim. It wasn’t as much as he needed but his headache did recede a little and his vision cleared. 

His mouth was still too dry to eat and the bread was probably poisoned anyway. He threw it to the dogs. One sniffed it warily and then looked up at him but the other - the one that had licked him - had no such reservations and didn’t even bother to chew. It gagged, once, and then swallowed it whole. 

***

The light in the room dimmed and it grew cold enough that he needed to wrap himself in that awful blanket. He did not lie down but sat cross legged leaning back against the bars, a position too awkward and uncomfortable to allow more than a doze. He would not sleep, for he feared what he would find there. Eventually the light grew again. The humans brought water and food he could not bring himself to eat. The light dimmed. He felt his hold slipping. The light grew. 

His shoulder wasn’t healing. The dressings hadn’t been changed and it was like as not going to become infected again. The lack of food and sleep wasn’t helping, he knew, nor the fact that he hadn’t bathed in what must have been weeks. 

His hair was a nightmare tangle of knots and dried blood, made worse by sticky strands of webbing. Suddenly, the sweet musty smell of it, the brush of it against his skin was more than he could bear. He had no way to cut it, so he tugged at it, trying to work out the mats, until the floor was grey with dirt and loose hairs. It hurt and he pulled harder at a particularly stubborn tangle until he felt something tear and a hank came free in his hand. The ends were clotted with fresh blood and something - one of the dogs? - was moaning, an awful animal sound that went on and on. 

It stopped eventually and he might have slept, he wasn’t sure. He watched the shadows creep across the wall, long and spindly, and listened to the mice scuttling and imagined he’d never left the temple. 

What was he waiting for? No one was going to save him this time. 

They would have to transport him and the dogs eventually. The cages had to be short term, somewhere to keep any animals they caught until they could sell them on for they were too cramped, too hard to clean to be anything but temporary. He needed to escape now then, before he was sold to someone who had a better idea as to how to keep one of his people imprisoned. 

There was no room for anything elaborate. He was too sick, too tired, and he’d never been all that bright anyway. Still, if he couldn’t outwit a pair of human peasants he deserved slavery and worse. He had them well trained - used to seeing him sitting up and alert if not responsive. He waited until the time they usually fed the dogs and then it was far too easy to collapse on his side and feign unconsciousness. 

He heard movement outside the room and began to breath as slow and shallow as he dared. 

The door creaked. A pause. “Hey you, wake up. Get up now,” the man said. “Beryl?  _ Beryl _ ? I think it died!”

“It’s probably asleep,” the woman called from the other room, sounding irritated. “Let it alone.”

Something prodded at his foot but he lay still as something dead. 

He heard the man curse and then the fumbling scrape as the key missed the lock once, twice and then slid home. The grind and click as it turned and the thump as the padlock hit the floor. The rattle of the bolt sliding back. The man was frightened, he realised. No one has ever feared him before but it made him feel no surer. He thought of Gilavar, who didn’t fear anything, of Cierza, who did but would never let it stop her, and then his mind shied away. He’d betrayed his family, his every breath was a betrayal and he had no right to draw strength from them now. 

The man leant over him, grabbed his shoulder - the uninjured one - and shook. That was close enough. The man didn’t notice him moving until Khazri had already slipped the knife from his belt and by then it was far too late. 

The blade wasn’t sharp - not his people’s make and not well cared for - but he knew where the arteries were, how to angle it to cut the scream in half before it left the throat. The man jarred his shoulder as he thrashed and he had to bite back a cry of his own but then the body went limp and he was squirming free from under it, adrenaline dragging him to his feet. 

After being unable to rise for so long, adrenaline alone wasn’t enough. His vision blurred and he slumped back against the wall until the dizziness passed. He retched and spat bile into the growing pool of blood on the floor. He had to keep going - the man might be dead but the woman was surely a greater threat. 

He left the body where it lay, visible from the doorway, sure to give a moment’s hesitation. The dogs watched him alertly from their cage, eyes shining and noses twitching at the warm, sticky scent in the air. 

“Jeff?” he heard from the next room, and backed up behind the door. He was shaking and his stomach lurched and twisted but that was just the aftereffects of infection. It wasn’t fear. He was strong enough for this.

Approaching footsteps, not half as loud as the pounding of his blood in his ears. 

The woman froze on the threshold, eyes on the body, and made a small, choked sound. Then she rushed towards it, leaving her back exposed. 

He struck. 

The knife was blunt and he was weak, so what should have been a killing blow went skittering off the ribs, drawing a shallow, ragged cut. The woman cried out in pain and turned, lashing out blindly. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge the oncoming blow but he turned with it, letting himself go limp and rolling as he hit the floor. The woman had no training, that was clear, but she was stronger and heavier than him. 

He didn’t try to rise - he’d never manage it - but struck up, aiming for the femoral artery and a quick end to the fight. He scored a wound on the her upper thigh but too shallow and then her foot caught him in the ribs and drove all the air from his lungs. 

He lost his grip on the knife and went scrambling for it as she snatched a hammer from the workbench setting tools clattering against each other and traps jingling. He dragged himself across the floor until his back hit the wall of cages. The dogs snapped and snarled and he felt their hot breath against the back of his neck. 

She walked towards him, hands shaking, lips drawn back to show her teeth. It was a claw hammer she held, spotted with rust but heavy enough to stove his head in. He pictured it clotted with mats of white hair and choked back a laugh or a sob. 

He wasn’t strong enough. ( _ when had he ever been? _ ) 

She drew back the hammer. 

His hand closed on the bolt that kept the dogs caged. He slid it free. 

The force as they slammed through the door rattled his teeth together but he was already up and moving as they leapt for her. They might only be half-grown but they were fast and surprise was on their side. She struck out and one yelped in pain but their fur was thick and they were too driven, by hunger or by his will, to stop. One closed its jaws around the wrist that held the hammer. She cried out and tried to shake it off but he had the knife by then. Her attention was on the dogs and he caught her in the side of the throat before she could react. The blade went in easier this time but he lacked the strength to pull it back out for another strike. He let go and she fell, one hand clutching at the hilt and then he couldn’t tell what was twitching and what was the dogs’ tugging disturbing the body. 

His legs gave out and he sat down heavily. He didn’t look at the corpses or the feeding dogs. The wound on his shoulder had broken open again, leaking brownish blood and clear fluid. It hurt to breath but tentative prodding suggested bruising rather than broken ribs. 

One of the dogs pulled back from the corpse to lick his face. Its muzzle was stained pink but he was grateful for the comfort. 

He stumbled through the door, trying to keep his back to the walls, checking every angle. The shack only had one other room - a firepit in the centre burnt down to embers with pots and pans heaped around it, an uneven table set with dirty plates, two camp beds heaped with furs lying against the wall. No windows but the light coming in through the chinks in the walls was bright enough. 

Too bright really. He’d not visited the world above in years and remembered nothing between leaving the tunnels and waking in the cabin other than eye searing whiteness. He approached the front door nervously, eyes squinted almost closed. 

Later, he would appreciate the vibrancy of the colours, the smell of the living forest on the breeze, the feel of grass under his bare feet. The vastness of the world and the freedom. But right then all he could process was the lack of immediate threats. Big lumpy toadstools - trees - everywhere, distant animal noises and running water nearby. No people around to investigate the deaths of his captors. No dangers. He did not look up at the sky. The world was too big and too bright and he still had work to do. 

He followed the sound of water to a stream and drank from it, fast enough that he retched, and then drank more. When he felt steadier he went back inside to sharpen the man’s knife and used it to cut his hair, blade scraping his scalp raw. Then he dragged the bodies outside and stripped them. He took the clothes to the stream and rinsed the blood from them before it stained too badly. His own clothes were rags and he discarded them, then crouched in the water to wash the blood and grime from his body, shaking with cold and with relief. He pulled on the trapper woman’s shirt and breeches after, still damp and too big though she had been closer to him in size than the man. He rekindled the fire and boiled water to clean and redress his wounded shoulder. There was a bucket by the door which he filled and used to scrub the blood from the floor while the dogs paced around him, getting in the way. One stuck its head into the pail and began to lap at the dirty water. 

Finally, when everything was tidied away and he could think of no more chores to do, he sank onto one of the beds and pulled a fur over his head. It blocked out the light creeping in through the walls and it muffled the scream that had been building since his mother first told him what duty demanded of him. 

He’d promised her that he wouldn’t weep and that he couldn’t stop the tears only made her more right, made him more deserving of his fate. 

If he killed himself, would it fix things? He wasn’t a priest, he didn’t know and it wasn’t fair and he still didn’t want to die. He cried harder, biting down on his wrist to try and silence himself. 

It didn’t work and one of the dogs began to howl. 

The Lady had passed him over. It wasn’t a sacrifice if it wasn’t freely given. She’d known that he wasn’t worthy, that he would fail. He was faithless and a coward and most of all he was  _ weak _ .

He would just have to live with it. He’d already killed so that he could. 

Khazri let himself scream. 

The dogs howled along. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com)!


End file.
